I blogged about Pownce yesterday, and I'm liking it a lot... I just wish that since it's built on top of the Flash Platform, it took advantage of server-side push technology such as FCS, FMS, LCDS, or bare XML Sockets... instead, it pulls every few seconds, which is extremely annoying. I understand that XML Sockets require additional server components, though most php, .net, j2ee servers have that capability built-in ... and it requires using a none-standard port ... which since the initial connection is triggered by the client, it shouldn't be a problem, and if it is, you can always fall-back to polling ... It would be much more efficient in the server load; much better than having thousands of clients polling every few seconds.

BTW, while debugging some applications today I happened to debug all Pownce traffic and it seems like their public API is very straight forward... maybe there's an opportunity of building another piece of software that makes use of such nice free public services?

Quick notes from the "My Job Went To India" book... So far it's a career strategy book that mixes business, common sense (business), and IT. It talks about choosing an IT career by analyzing current market trends -- US and offshore --, weighting new, mainstream, and dying technologies, specializing, generalizing, and making sure programmers understand the business domain. It explains the history of CIOs, Architects, Designers, and Programmers ... many mentions to Java and Ruby. Encourages you to explore other technologies and languages, investing in yourself ... take the time to learn and teach ... the best learning is done through teaching. See your career as a business, where there's a supply and demand, low risk yield to low gains, and high risk could yield to high gains or no gains at all. I liked the section about interviews and skill set gaming theory.

Papervision3D moves from private testing to a full public beta. It's very easy to use and to integrate into your Flash 8, Flash CS3 and Flex projects.

It is released under the MIT Open Source license, which means it is absolutely free for any commercial use.

Source code
The project is now hosted in Google Code, where you will find all the downloads, the very latest source code via Subversion, issue tracking and project workspace. Existing users must use this new svn address.

API
Here is the documentation of the AS3 public classes and methods. It is also included in the source code download, along with examples to get you up and running right away.

Wiki
If you are not sure, this is the place to begin. Includes many examples, tutorials and tips, plus our Getting Started FAQ with detailed download and installation instructions.

Discussion
If you have any questions, you can subscribe to our OSFlash mailing list or access it via our Nabble forum.

This reel is a little review of what we have seen so far. The Papervision3D team can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it next. [source]

So I just got today a book my buddy John Paul Ashenfelter recommended: My Job Went To India And All I Got Was This Lousy Book. He admits it may be the worst title for a tech book, ever, but it might be the best pragmatic programming book out there. Well, I trust JP on all pragmatic development, Agile, XP, and Deployment Automation, so this book must be good... I'll post reviews as soon as I find time to read it :)

Quick note on debugging a Rich Internet Application. As you probably know, RIAs usually don't refresh and communicate to the server in the background. You can't easily see the traffic, so I usually recommend using Firebug for Firefox, Live HTTP Headers, Fiddler, and my recommendation, Service Capture.... Well, there's a new kid on the block ... not so new perhaps, but I just finally tried it and I'm loving it. Charles is another http/amf monitoring application with many more capabilities than service capture ... actually, forget about the capabilities, the fact that I can open it with Firefox with no problems should be enough ... but if that's not enough, you can see the traffic is a structured view instead of sequential, which allows you to see the requests by domain, then folder, then file, and it even groups all the flash remoting calls together ... it's a beautiful thing. In addition it does have more capabilities such as seeing cookies, request / response sizes, mirror responses to disk, analyze cache, bandwidth throttle, spoof dns, and port forwarding. I'm very impressed.

jQuery 1.1.3.1: 800%+ Faster, still 20KB

1. Improved speeds, with DOM traversal over 800% faster than in 1.1.2.
2. A re-written event system, with more graceful handling of keyboard events.
3. A re-written effects system (with an accompanying fx test suite), featuring faster execution and better cross-platform support.

Apollo is now called AIR... note, not Adobe AIR, just AIR .... AIR stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, so you don't want to call it Adobe Adobe Integrated Runtime. You can get the beta from Adobe Labs.

Adobe Article on Six Must-See AIR Sample Applications

Aptana IDE (or Eclipse Plugin) new supports AIR.

• AIR Project contains all necessary files for out-of-the box launching of AIR applications
• Export wizard for bundling and deploying AIR applications
• Easy import of Ajax libraries into Adobe AIR projects
• Integrated content assist for AIR SDK
• Help and online documentation

We are launching tomorrow a project that requires Flash to upload a file to a server, which is usually done through the FireReference class... Strangely, it works everywhere except on a Mac OS. We tested on OSX with Firefox and Safari, getting identical results: the file would upload, but the onComplete call would never get triggered.

The server environment for this particular project was php4 and amfphp for all remoting calls. After reading a couple of blogs, it seems like there's a Flash-side solution by using uploadCompleteData, which only works with ActionScript 3. Our project was developed with ActionScript 2, so I kept looking. Then I found that if php (or any server-side language) returns a space it should work ... nothing yet .... then I found that someone got it to work returning a "1", and indeed, echo "1"; fixed it for all environments... finally working on Windows, IE, FF, Mac, FF, Safari ...

So now you know, if you use the Flash FileReference class, make sure to always return a string so Mac OS knows the file finished uploading.